The Brains Behind Some of the Finest Cellars

BOOSTING THE 'FUN QUOTIENT' | Robert Bohr, left, and David Beckwith of Grand Cru Wine Consulting, setting up for an event Monday in New York.
Philip Montgomery for The Wall Street Journal

By

Jay McInerney

April 19, 2013 3:51 p.m. ET

THIS PAST MONDAY afternoon, a vast apartment on New York's East End Avenue was swarming with caterers, musicians, bartenders, furniture movers and decorators. The scene in the wine room, by contrast, was relatively serene, as Robert Bohr carefully removed the cork from a 6-liter bottle of 1991 Dominus and then employed a length of surgical tubing to siphon the contents into two 3-liter carafes with the help of his partner David Beckwith. Watching Mr. Bohr sucking wine into the long tube, his colleague Ned Benedict asked, "Where'd you learn to siphon like that?"

"New Jersey," Mr. Bohr replied, crouching on the floor as he directs a stream of Cabernet into the first carafe. Though he was indeed born in Jersey, Mr. Bohr later confided that he learned this esoteric technique for serving whopper formats—which avoids stirring up sediment at the bottom of the bottle—from Burgundian winemaker Jeremy Seysses of Domaine Dujac. It's just one of many skills Mr. Bohr brings to the small group of wine collectors he advises as a partner of Grand Cru Wine Consulting. On that night, Messrs. Bohr, Beckwith and Benedict were taking care of the wine service for a party of 150 people thrown by a client. The room was a showcase of trophy bottles, mostly in large formats—a 12-liter 1955 Conterno Monfortino, multiple Jeroboams of Romanée-Conti—that they'd purchased for the client over the years.

‘'I was born to do this,' one of the partners said of high-end wine consulting.’

Founded in 2007, Grand Cru is a kind of concierge service for well-heeled wine aficionados. "Our clients love wine and they love entertaining," Mr. Bohr says, "but their jobs are so demanding that they don't have time to deal with all the nitty-gritty details. I try to increase their fun quotient. For instance, a client might say, 'My son's going to Paris next week. Where should he go? Where should he eat?' "

In 2001, while working as a sommelier at Daniel, Mr. Bohr began advising and purchasing wine for a frequent customer who wanted to build a collection. He continued to help the budding oenophile, a financier, even as he moved on to direct the wine program at Washington Park and later at Cru, the late, lamented three-star restaurant with the two-volume wine list, where he was when he teamed up with Messrs. Beckwith and Benedict to form Grand Cru.

ENLARGE

Founded in 2007, Grand Cru is a kind of concierge service for well-heeled wine aficionados.
Philip Montgomery for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Bohr was an undergrad at NYU, planning a career in law, when he started working at Gramercy Tavern. "I fell in love with the restaurant business," he says, crediting restaurateur Danny Meyer with instilling a sense of pride and professionalism in his staff. Mr. Bohr worked his way up from waiter to captain, eventually realizing that he was getting more passionate about food and wine than he was about his course work. His burgeoning interest in wine eventually lead to a job as sommelier at Babbo, the Batali/Bastianich flagship, which boasted the best Italian wine list in the city.

It wasn't until he moved on to Daniel that he began to develop an interest in French wines, and yet within a few years he had become renowned for his knowledge of Burgundy—a friend and consigliere to many of those who make it and collect it. It's hard to overstate Mr. Bohr's influence or his reputation in this particular, rarefied corner of the wine world. In 2010, he put together a group of American financiers with Burgundian winemakers Dominique Lafon and Jean-Marc Roulot in a $16 million purchase of Domaine René Manuel in Meursault. For some of Mr. Bohr's admirers in the hospitality industry, the apex of his career came earlier, when he threw a patron of Cru, a corporate CEO, out of the restaurant after reminding her that she had been abusive to him when he was a fledgling waiter at Gramercy Tavern.

Mr. Beckwith, who was born and raised in Manhattan, also served time as a sommelier at Babbo, having had his wine epiphany during a semester abroad in Florence. For three years he worked for Zachys, the Scarsdale, N.Y.-based wine retailer and auction house, so it was something of a homecoming when he arrived at its warehouse this past week, warmly greeting employees before getting down to the business of examining lots for the coming April 25 and 26 auctions on behalf of his clients. Zachys had set aside the lots in advance. He examined a magnum of 1945 Gruaud-Larose, holding it aloft as he checked the color with a small flashlight. "The color's good," he said, "plus it has that somewhat chunky sediment a very old Bordeaux should have. Burgundy has a finer sediment. And you can see the glass is old, it's irregular, which is good."

Attending auctions and bidding for clients is one of Mr. Beckwith's roles at the company. At last week's Acker wine auction, he sat at a central table at the Tribeca Grill in downtown Manhattan, raising his paddle frequently, casually, just a little flip of the wrist, confident that his bid would be registered, sometimes lowering it with a shrug when he thought the price had gone too high and sometimes dueling on a particularly choice lot until he won. He was flanked by two clients, who kept looking to him for advice. "I don't like this cellar," he told them, of a consignment comprising some 30 or 40 lots. "You can just tell these wines have come from all over and they've been moved around a lot." His clients nodded appreciatively, sipping from their flutes of 1988 Krug, and refrained from bidding. When a case of Hundred Acre, a Napa cult Cabernet, hammered for a surprising $4,000, one client said to Mr. Beckwith, "we should sell mine."

"Done," Mr. Beckwith replied.

At 6:30 p.m. on this particular Thursday most of Grand Cru's clients are at home, or more likely still in their offices, trading stocks and bonds and commercial paper, confident that Mr. Beckwith will buy what they like to drink, for the right price. Some of the unadvised collectors in the room tonight, well-lubricated on their own fine wine as well as bottles supplied by Acker, may find themselves suffering buyer's remorse when they see their invoices in the morning. I speak from experience here.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Beckwith was making the rounds on Central Park West, tending to some very pricey wines. Schmoozing with the doorman and then the elevator man at one client's building, he was admitted by the housekeeper. In the kitchen, which was bigger than most Manhattan studios, he sorted through the 400 or 500 bottles on hand in two Eurocaves in the kitchen (the bulk of this client's wine resides underneath his house in Southampton, N.Y.), selecting bottles for a dinner party the following week and standing them upright so that the sediment will settle. He also put aside about two cases of wine, including some 1982 Lafite, to send off to auction. "Given the price it's trading for—about $3,000 right now—and the price he paid for it, it's smarter to sell it than drink it," he said. The client stands to realize a nice profit.

Off Duty's Half Full

Mr. Beckwith's next stop was 15 Central Park West—the most coveted condo address in Manhattan—where he picked up from the doormen keys to three of the private wine cellars that are among that were among the building's selling points. (Not so coincidentally, perhaps—Will Zeckendorf, who developed the building with his brother, Arthur, is a passionate and knowledgeable wine collector.) Down in the basement, Mr. Beckwith unlocked the door to a redwood vault featuring thousands of bottles, some of them so rare I'd only heard rumors of their existence—a magnum of '45 Musigny Vieilles Vignes Comte Georges de Vogüé, another mag of '85 Ponsot Clos de la Roche—and selects four bottles for a coming dinner, standing them upright and snapping a picture for later reference.

"I was born to do this," Mr. Beckwith says. Later that week, listening to him gleefully describing the Jeroboams and imperials that he and Mr. Bohr poured at the big party on East End Avenue, I'm inclined to believe him.

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